A Porsche has been driven over the footway and into the Gerrards Cross branch of Cafe Nero, temporarily trapping two customers. No charge has been made by Thames Valley police, who are quoted as saying that the incident is “not thought to be suspicious”.
In this essay I examine this and a few similar incidents to see how the authorities accept and tolerate obvious rule and law breaking by motorists. As well as the Police services involved, the official “road safety” authorities in highway engineering collude and connive with this sort of violent behaviour. There is little comment on these incidents to challenge what appears to be the dominant narrative of tolerance of this behaviour, not least the type of language involved.
I challenge that narrative below, and argue against the dominant approach to these incidents, as well as the tolerance of them by the authorities. I think it indicates that in a crucial respect – the apparent acceptance of rule and law breaking by people simply because they have chosen to drive – this society is fundamentally uncivilised.
I am choosing seven different incidents which I have picked up in the last few months to illustrate my case. I am used to reading of similar cases on a regular basis: nothing about them is, in my view, exceptional or atypical.
Incident 1: Sheffield, reported 21st January 2015
Photo: @Ventureresi
According to the Guardian: “In Sheffield, a car careered through the front window of a house after losing control in the treacherous conditions. It was pictured by passers-by after it mounted the kerb, drove through the garden wall and into the property.”
The issue here is apparently one of an inanimate object which manages to “lose(s) control” (presumably this is a loss of self-control), and power itself (“mount”, “drive”) with no human agency involved.
If I may continue to examine the language used: the one occasion where pejorative words are employed again relates to the inanimate, this time the weather conditions. These are said to be nothing less than “treacherous”. The implication is that unsuspecting drivers have been betrayed by what many of us have assumed to be a normal occurrence, namely snow falling in Yorkshire in the winter.
The Yorkshire Post uses the same language regarding the inanimate object: “The red Ford lost control and mounted the curb, before ploughing into the front window of the property on the residential street”.
I contacted the local police through Twitter to find:
Nether Edge SNT @netheredgesnt 2 hrs2 hours ago @CHAIRRDRF not my patch, but my colleagues attended. No injuries or charges; just a very unfortunate accident due to ice, snow and steep hill.
I don’t want to get pompous about this, but it fascinates me that everything other than the driver is blamed. I’m sure that car-dependent Sheffield residents have all sorts of problems to contend with, but surely they should be aware that (a) Sheffield is hilly and (b) when it has been snowing the road surface is likely to be icy?
Incident 2: Whittlesey, A605, reported 21st February 2015.
The account on the Facebook page of Policing Whittlesey describes the incident:
Policing Whittlesey
Officers on patrol in Whittlesey witnessed a vehicle roll several times on the A605, landing upside down in a water filled ditch, a lone female was trapped inside the car full of icy water, the quick thinking officers put themselves at risk to rescue the the lady working tirelessly to prise the door open and pull her to safety, the lady is currently in hospital and on the road to recovery! If it wasn’t for these officers being in the right place at the right time it could of been a very different story. The roads are going to be icy of the next few days, please drive safely
I should make one point very clear: along with the commenters on the Facebook page, I applaud the police officers for their selflessness and commitment to assisting any member of the public in distress; however they came to be in the situation described.
I do have a problem though. In fact, I think the story as described by Police officers (and those commenting) is fascinating for what it leaves out. In fact, I think the Police and others commenting have the problem.
As indicated in my exchange on Twitter with Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire Roads Police:
BCH Road Policing @roadpoliceBCH Feb 22
Well done @FenCops. What policing is all about. http://on.fb.me/19VNDhT pic.twitter.com/5myTUu2qOC”9:06 am – 22 Feb 2015 · Details
@roadpoliceBCH @Road_Safety_GB @FenCops What was she or other drivers charged with? Since we are talking about “what policing is all about”.
At no point in the accounts and Facebook comments is there the suggestion that the driver who overturned her car had committed any kind of offence or done anything wrong. Indeed, the driver is only seen as a victim, for example in one comment that the Council may have not put enough grit on the roads. Another comment argues that the task of rescuing errant drivers is what the Police are for, and not just catching criminals. Or charging any careless driver?
Incident 3: Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: 16th May 2015.
According to the local newspaper :
Porsche Smashes Through Coffee Shop Window
A Thames Valley Police spokesman said: “The incident involved one vehicle and resulted in minor injuries to a woman who was the only person in the car. Two people, a man and a woman, were also temporarily trapped inside the building but were released. The road has since been reopened.”
Police said the incident was not thought to be suspicious.(My emphasis)
As in other cases, there were some comments to the effect that the inanimate object – a car – was assumed to be the problem, rather than the person legally in charge of it. The other comment is the one I use in the heading of this piece, namely that there is “nothing suspicious” about driving a high-powered car across the footway of a busy street and into a coffee shop, in a Home Counties town on a Saturday afternoon.
The Fire Brigade (who attended the scene) tweeted :
Bucks and MK Fire @Bucksfire · May 16 . So glad it wasn’t worse. Must have been terrifying for everyone.
Note the equivalence between the suffering of people sitting in the coffee shop and the driver. Neutralising the difference between those endangering others and those who are endangered by motor vehicles is a staple feature of “road safety” ideology
Incident 4 Elephant and Castle , London 30 July 2014
Photo: Evening Standard
In this case where the two car occupants had minor injuries, police said they were investigating and that no arrests had been made. (It may be the case that the vehicle was forced off the road by a third party, but this possibility could be easily investigated through use of the CCTV cameras at the roundabout). Elephant and Castle is known as a site where the Metropolitan Police Service regularly stop and issue fines to cyclists who have gone over the stop line when signals are on red, an infraction rather less likely to hurt or kill other road users than whatever happened in this incident.
Incident 5 Blackheath, London 17th March 2015
The lorry “overturned”. One minor injury. No reports of any arrests made.
Incident 6 28 October 2014 Wandsworth Road, London.
In one account: “A Waitrose truck flips over”. In another “A driver has escaped uninjured but is ‘shaken’ after his lorry overturned”. As in the previous incident the drivers seem to have had nothing to do with the inanimate objects’ behaviour. No arrests mentioned.
Incident 7 Staffordshire, 26th October 2014
This time the driver does seem to have done something wrong – he “overturned his vehicle”, and then shortly after it crashes into a house, apparently as it was left on a slope without the hand brake on. He is, however, described sympathetically as “Britain’s unluckiest HGV driver” No mention of an arrest.
I stated above that there is nothing atypical about these crashes – both in the way they are reported and the way police respond to them. The only reason why some of them reach the national media is because they feature dramatic images: they involve large vehicles and roads being closed, or something peculiar (a car in a coffee shop). Indeed, we should look at what is going on with all the normal car crashes which occur on the roads of Britain.
To get a rough idea of these “normal” incidents: approximately 4 million insurance claims are made by British motorists annually. The majority of crashes (between 75 – 90%) involving motor vehicles do not involve personal injury, and thus do not even require reporting to the Police. Ultimately this normality leads to Police and the media thinking that “nothing suspicious” has occurred, even when a high-powered car ends up in a coffee shop.
Normal crashes and the “road safety” industry
It isn’t just the Police who are implicated in tolerating and accepting this. Despite persistent anodyne requests from the publicity wing of the “road safety” movement for drivers to try to be careful, the main thrust of “road safety” has in fact been to accommodate rule and law breaking driving. Indeed, I argue that “road safety” has colluded and connived with careless, negligent, dangerous driving.
Highway…
After all, billions of pounds has been spent by highway engineers on creating a road environment designed around the needs of careless, dangerous etc. driving. Cutting down and removing road side trees ; installing crash proof barriers and central reservations; placing shock absorbing structures around bridge supports and other solid structures; making lamp posts which break, so occupants of vehicles which crash into them are protected; laying anti-skid where drivers have crashed after going too fast; placing rumble strips to assist inattentive drivers etc. All of these and similar measures have been staples of highway engineering for decades.
On top of this, straightening sight lines and similar measures are based on implicitly ignoring the age-old requirement for drivers to “always drive in such a way that you can stop within visible distance”. Of course, sometimes engineers have defended these practices to me on the basis that innocent motorists may be protected from dangerous drivers (for example, those driving across the centre–line by a crash barrier). That’s true – not all these measures are to directly protect the rule or law breaking driver, as they may be protecting their victims. Nevertheless, many of them (the typical roadside tree removal) are, and all are based on accommodating rule/law-breaking driving.
…and vehicle engineering
Similarly most motor vehicle “road safety” engineering is about producing more crashworthy cars to accommodate behaviour which threatens other road users. Collapsible steering wheels, seat belts, air bags, crumple zones, side impact protection systems, roll bars etc.: all are based on an assumption that motorists are inherently likely to crash and/or be crashed into by their fellow motorists.
Even worse, it has been known for decades that this tendency exacerbates tendencies to carelessness among drivers.
So where does this take us?
I am suggesting that there is a widespread evasion of responsibility throughout our culture in general, and among those authorities supposedly responsible for safety on the road in particular. We are up against a belief system based on a sense of entitlement among motorists, which impedes both moves towards sustainable transport policy implementation in general, and reduction in road danger in particular – and the institutions and practices of official “road safety” are part of this.
That doesn’t mean we should despair. Some of us stress the low risks of travel by the benign modes, and the ways we might move forward. But what it does mean is that if this society has accepted “normal” crashes in the ways illustrated, we can and should base our demands accordingly.
For a start, although the level and extent of motorist incompetence and unwillingness to obey rules and laws may be exaggerated, it is organisations representing motorists – and those of the “road safety” industry – that are claiming that driving is inherently dangerous. Why else do drivers need the plethora of safety aids (seat belts, air bags etc.) in cars, and the enormous sums spent of engineering the highway (cutting down roadside trees, installing crash barriers and anti-skid etc.) . That means we can demand forms of driver liability in collisions where cyclists or pedestrians are involved, at least in civil law, accordingly.
It means we can argue that enforcement exercises like Operation Safeway should stop being biased towards the rule/law-breaking which is less dangerous to others, namely that by cyclists .
(At our conference on law enforcement last year an officer in the MPS’ Cycle Task Force stated that he saw no problem in arresting law-breaking cyclists if the law is enforced for errant motorists. The point is that it isn’t).
It means that highway engineers (as well as individual drivers) should accept the likelihood of pedestrians and cyclists making mistakes: Accommodating this is less anti-social than accommodating driver rule and law breaking..
It means that vehicle engineering should be based on controls on the potential of drivers to hurt or kill others. At the very least “black box” systems to monitor crash causation should be on the agenda.
Interventions and the dominant culture
As a general rule we need to recognise that any specific intervention occurs within the culture which is car-centred and discriminatory against the non-car modes in general, and against non-motorised modes in particular.
Consider two commonly discussed areas of intervention: calls for forceful changes in law enforcement and sentencing policy, or the re-organisation of the highway to take space away from general traffic and re-allocate it specifically to cycling, are fine in themselves, but have to be assessed in the context of the surrounding dominant culture. As theorists of risk compensation have argued, unless there is an underlying change in the extent and kind of risk taking in society, official interventions can simply press down on the problem in one area while it pops up somewhere else. In these cases, unless the reasons for cracking down on forms of driver behaviour are carefully explained in terms of the obligations and duties of care owed by the motorised towards others, in the case of law enforcement and sentencing changes we may get resentment and a lack of willingness to support other forms of road danger reduction. Re-allocation of road space to cyclists may increase the unwillingness of drivers to behave properly in highway environments where drivers will have to be in close proximity to, and sharing space with, cyclists.
Now, this does not mean that we never engage in any kind of programme of danger reduction measures, such as those above, 20 mph areas, motor traffic reduction measures, etc. But it does mean that we have to be aware of the knock-on effects of these moves, and how they are affected by – and also affect – widely held beliefs about the kind of risk taking that is acceptable in the highway environment. Whatever the success of a specific intervention, it always has to be seen in the context of the car-centred (I have elsewhere called it “car supremacist”) culture we live in. And, regrettably, despite the best efforts of many individual professionals, the institutions of “road safety” are very much part of this culture.
Conclusion
Motor danger has been nornalised in the car-centred society we live in, not least by the agencies who should be dealing with it. But understanding this can allow us to move towards an alternative based on reducing danger at source and making those responsible for it accountable. This can come about by specific programmes being implemented as part of an overall cultural change towards a society where car usage – and specifically, the ways in which cars are driven – is seen in a more critical way. If we don’t achieve this, we will indeed be living in a fundamentally uncivilised society.
5:12 pm – 22 Feb 2015 · Details
Road Danger Reduction Forum 
Where law breaking motorists do get taken to court, all too often the culture of the sacred driving licence applies, this is a very (car) sick society.
I’ve tracked 3 killings by refuse trucks reversing in the past 2 years, and would invite any other reports of the same events elsewhere. Glasgow managed to put a casual hired-in driver at the wheel without properly ensuring that the driver & crew recognised the hazards of reversing the truck down a back-lane without an attendant on foot as a vanguard. They were fined £20,000 for running over a pensioner who died days later in hospital.
South Lakeland plumbs the depths of all that should be avoided in safety management and good governance. They kill one person when reversing a refuse truck and then introduce an avoidable reversing move on another collection round – reversing into a school playground to compound the stupidity of not properly assessing the risks involved – and kill the janitor.
They get fined very heavily following prosecution by HSC, but no one goes to jail.
Had these been rail incidents we might have seen just one event, and that would trigger an industry-wide instruction to review all reversing manouevres, and fit available and proven devices which restrict the speed when reverse gear is engaged, and apply the brakes when an intelligent sensor detects a pedestrian too close to an approaching truck.
We have another fatal crash with a Glasgow bin lorry which has massively laid out the flaws with the current system. The day following the crash we were promised “Answers without delay” yet whilst air, rail, and marine incidents deliver an interim statement of facts within a couple of weeks of a serious event we had over a month of speculation in the absence of such detail, leaving many responsible operators of refuse trucks still in limbo over any measures they should be considering to prevent another ‘Glasgow’ tragedy. Contrast this with the German Wings air crash, where, within days, the basic cause had been established and airlines world wide were amending their flight deck protocols to prevent a repeat event (although this was not the first such incident of the type – an earlier event in Africa had not been spotted and broadcast as a serious safety issue).
In Glasgow the shambles of the current system is woefully exposed, when the standard process of crash investigation and remedial action is set out. Section 39 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 mandates that Glasgow Council must investigate this crash (s.39.3.a) of a Glasgow Council owned truck driven by a Glasgow Council employed driver on a Glasgow Council managed street, and then Glasgow Council must use the results of Glasgow Council’s own investigation to inform Glasgow Council on measures which need to be taken to prevent any future crash of this type (s.39.3.b). Do I need to say more?
I have done an FoIA request to Glasgow Council requesting the details on their Section 39 delivery (investigations, and actions taken) which unlike air, rail and marine crashes are not published, and was not impressed. That picture is repeated UK-wide, and at the root of whay we see the same crashes often repeated at the same locations “One may be unfortunate Twice (and more) seems culpably careless” to borrow from Oscar Wilde’s play and Lady Bracknell’s lines.
We lack the objective and impartial investigation of RAIB, AAIB and MAIB, and in turn the independent and empowered regulators ORR, CAA and MCA, to direct operators exploiting the resources of the UK roads for commercial gain, and the infrastructure providers on the safe and effective delivery of the roads used. Commercial operator regulation is piecemeal and both under resourced and lacking delivery in many key areas. We have the Traffic Commssioners, without the safety reports stream from an independent investigator and only managing large vehicle operations for less than 3% of registered vehicles. We have a burgeoning and unregulated fleet of small vans and trucks being used for home delivery and internet shopping and various trade services – registrations up 26% in the past 10 years use up c.17% from traffic counts. We have parochial regulation of taxis and some section 19 and section 22 minibuses with the risks, and variance in standards that system can deliver, whilst Uber (and pedicabs) go unregulated or in an even greater mess.
In 1999 the UK railways delivered passenger deaths by the bus-load annually until we had the watershed of Ladbroke Grove (31 dead) and Lord Cullen would not accept the “It Happens” attitude to avoidable deaths. RAIB was set up ORR role established, and CIRAS put in place as confidential safety reporting system. As a result the last passenger to die through a train crash was in 2007, a record almost damaged in 2010 by a road vehicle driven off a bridge and landing on a train (oh the irony), but currently still intact. We could deliver this for roads if the will was there, and two key measures are in the system.
1) Triennial Review of the Traffic Commissioners role and resources – report completed delivery being discussed.
2) PACTS report on Transport Safety – recommends delivery of matching structure for roads safety and regulation a Highways AIB and roads equivalent of ORR and CAA – NOT the current fudge of adding a roads ‘regulation’ section to ORR, which only regulates Highways England’s delivery of infrastructure, with no safety remit nor role in regulating the local roads authorities or their contractors.
Please press for this and watch like hawks for the way the current system fails.
You describe society as fundamentally uncivillised using the incidents of drivers crashing into buildings. Which is a good angle and is a visually striking (pun intended) way of illustrating this as opposed to using more emotionally charged examples such as KSI cases where drivers get off lightly.
Your conclusion to this acceptance of rule and law breaking is that society is fundamentally uncivilised (as opposed to?), which while descriptive of a state doesn’t explore how and why we have come to this state and why we tolerate violence by one group (in cars) against people and property not in cars. Your list of excuses as to the cause of such incidents such as icy roads, lines of sight, hilly places, snow and poor gritting by the council etc do illustrate the lengths various agencies will go to avoid having a group/societal construct about how it is legitimate to move around, invalidated.
Perhaps the answer lies in in the fact that how we move around is a fundamental core way we see ourselves and as we motorised as a (capitalist) society individuals identify themselves as ‘drivers’ their cars representing freedom, independence, safety, status, sex, their (mobile) home extension etc which are so fundamental to how this majority group see themselves. These constructs are reinforced by advertising, media, acceptance by agencies of driver transgression (which isn’t seen as transgression, while law abiding cyclists riding in the middle of the lane, or without a helmet, is construed as trangressive, even just choosing to cycle is often seen by some as strange and irrational behaviour [See Dave Horton’s fear of cycling]).
Since driving is such a core construct in our society anything that may invalidate this is seen as a threat, and since this validation is by individuals within a (majority) group each individual seeking others to confirm this ‘uncivillised’ status quo it could be a long slow process to shift this. I have mentioned to you before that despite the RDRF being around for many years there are only 2 road danger reduction officers in the country while road safety officers still rule, many of whom have hardly shifted in their outlook.
Patrick Field once described a time which he said the’re would be ‘blood on the streets’, the time where drivers up the ante in their resistance to change in this core construct which may bring about a quick shift like the white bicycle movement in Holland after an intolerable number of children were killed by drivers..
(I suppose that there is a place for optimism from other areas such as last centuries shift in attitude to women and gay people).
At a fundamental level, motoring, and even motor vehicle crashes, are a “desirable” feature of a capitalist economy: motoring and crashes are excellent forms of popular consumption, and capitalism requires ever-increasing consumption to work. Not only does crashing a car into a building mean increased Gross Domestic Product as the people involved have to buy a new car and repair their house, but there are other usefully large amounts of work for the police and ambulance services. These crashes keep a large number of professional people employed. Firemen, for example, now spend a lot more time attending motor crashes than they spend attending building fires.
Insurance companies also benefit from motor crashes. In days gone by it used to be cheaper to buy “third party fire and theft” insurance than “comprehensive”, but today the opposite is often true. The insurers like paying out on comprehensive claims, because it spreads the word that comprehensive insurance is worth the premiums, it increases turnover, and because people don’t understand the cost of increased premiums through losing their huge “no claims bonus” “discounts”.
We live in a society where “the right to drive how we like” has been carefully nurtured by the Press (funded to a large extent by motoring advertisements) and by Government (who gain significant income from motoring taxes, and whose friends in Big Business benefit from massively expensive road building schemes). I fear that until these lucrative financial links are somehow broken we will continue to see motoring being encouraged, whatever the costs. We are effectively governed by Big Business, these days. Look up “TTIP” for how this could soon get a lot worse.
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